A Deconstructed Venezuelan DNA by Pietro Daprano

Starting on April 8th and until May 31st, the Connect Now Room of the Arts Connection will present Typologies, essays, and other models of stereotypes, an expositive project in which the artist questions the icons that form part of the idiosyncrasy of the Caribbean country, and the interpretation thereof by its population

On April 08th the Connect Now Room of the Arts Connection Foundation shall receive the Typologies, essays, and other models of stereotypes exposition from Pietro Daprano, of Venezuelan nationality.

The work, which shall be opened to public until May 31st, includes the curatorship of Adriana Meneses Ímber, magister in Art Administration from the Philadelphia University, and who explains that the work of this contemporary artist manifests the contradictions and juxtapositions from different icons that form part of the Venezuelan idiosyncrasy. “To be born in Venezuela takes you to certain constant references: Kinetism, what is geometric, regarding the misses, oil, the Ávila, the light. In Daprano’s case, he also encourages you to question what is established, what we give for granted, the art market, what must be (…). Ever since I learned about his work he has always questioned us as spectators, whom are willing to accept fashion, what is established and stereotypes without further question”, claims the researcher.

Daprano, graduated in Visual Arts in the Instituto Universitario Armando Reverón in Caracas, explains that Typologies, essays, and other models of stereotypes is an expositive project designed as a “cellular nucleus” from which it is possible to “examine the visual appearance of the image and the representation forms thereof as a concept of identity, style, beauty and power”.

The work includes exotic tropical plants from Latin America and Western Africa, pictures, templates, silhouettes and other overlapped fragments. The result? “Pieces that resemble remains of ideas, concepts and material forms that suggest a revision to the precarious mutations, repetitions and versions of radical social reforms that have influenced or ruled over social, cultural, artistic and political representation models”, also explains the photographer and performer.

It is about a work that deconstructs, juxtaposes, redefines our DNA, and challenges us to find ourselves in it. “The artists essays once again with that humorous touch of healthy mockery, placing us before the mirror of what to hope to become, or what we are”, explains the curator.

The base series and the derivatives thereof

Different pieces or series, which are constantly mutating, derived from Typologies… –which the artist calls the “nuclear serie” –, because the nature of the expositive project keeps open the possibility to always generate new creation lines. “It is a ‘living’ process in which I am still working on”, claims Daprano. Two of said “derivative” series are: Impressionist Model (2015 – 2017) and Dialéctica y sistema sin resolución (2014 – 2017).

The former shows an intervention of photographic portraits regarding the cultural scope of fashion, in which images appear to have movement due to the presence of colors in geometric shapes. “The imaginary movement of the color palette suggests a pictorial styled artistic postcard showing the fragmentation of the brush-stroke or the binding of colors of impressionists”, claims the contemporary artist Daprano. It is about a revision to notions and concepts regarding light, memory, shadow, color and what is simple.

On the other hand, Dialéctica y sistema sin resolución (2014 – 2017) consists in the reproduction of works of other artists, mostly belonging to geometric abstraction, to which Daprano overlapped images from other fields latter on “with the purpose to analyze extremes, tensions, contradictions and margins of plagiarism, copies, and duplicates versus the original work”. He also claims: “That the series refers to the premises of contemporary practice, cooked in the same soup of that of the aesthetics of contemporary art”.

Each work is, in itself, “a sort of monument that strives to refer to the collective oblique memory, the superficial mechanics about the notions of worth, principles and ethics that rule our contemporary conduct ”, concludes Daprano.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Pietro Daprano (1971) was born in Caracas, Venezuela and currently lives in Miami, Florida. This contemporary artist Graduated in Visual Arts in the Instituto Universitario Armando Reverón. His visual projects include four individual expositions conducted in museums and galleries in Venezuela, as well as different participations in international collective samples. Amongst the awards he has received is the Third Price in the 65th Biannual Salón Arturo Michelena, Casa de la Cultura, in Valencia, Venezuela (2011), and the First Price in Photography, Municipal Award of Visual Arts from the Salón Juan Lovera, in Caracas, Venezuela (2002).